Various people raised concerns that growth might ruin the culture after reading my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread. There has been some discussion about whether endless September, a phenomenon that kills online discussion groups, is a significant threat to LessWrong and what can be done. I really care about it, so I volunteered to code a solution myself for free if needed. Luke invited debate on the subject (the debate is here) and will be sent the results of this poll and asked to make a decision. It was suggested by him in an email that I wait a little while and then post my poll (meta threads are apparently annoying to some, so we let people cool off). Here it is, preceded by a Cliff's notes summary of the concerns.
Why this is worth your consideration:
- Yvain and I checked the IQ figures in the survey against other data this time, and the good news is that it's more believable that the average LessWronger is gifted. The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey. It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong's average has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.
- Eliezer documented the arrival of poseurs (people who superficially copycat cultural behaviors - they are reported to over-run subcultures) which he termed "Undiscriminating Skeptics".
- Efforts to grow LessWrong could trigger an overwhelming deluge of newbies.
- LessWrong registrations have been increasing fast and it's possible that growth could outstrip acculturation capacity. (Chart here)
- The Singularity Summit appears to cause a deluge of new users that may have similar effect to the September deluges of college freshman that endless September is named after. (This chart shows a spike correlated with the 2011 summit where 921 users joined that month, which is roughly equal to the total number of active users LW tends to have in a month if you go by the surveys or Vladmir's wget.)
- A Slashdot effect could result in a tsunami of new users if a publication with lots of readers like the Wall Street Journal (they used LessWrong data in this article) decides to write an article on LessWrong.
- The sequences contain a lot of the culture and are long meaning that "TLDR" may make LessWrong vulnerable to cultural disintegration. (New users may not know how detailed LW culture is or that the sequences contain so much culture. I didn't.)
- Eliezer said in August that the site was "seriously going to hell" due to trolls.
- A lot of people raised concerns.
Two Theories on How Online Cultures Die:
Overwhelming user influx.
There are too many new users to be acculturated by older members, so they form their own, larger new culture and dominate the group.
Trending toward the mean.
A group forms because people who are very different want a place to be different together. The group attracts more people that are closer to mainstream than people who are equally different because there are more mainstream people than different people. The larger group attracts people who are even less different in the original group's way for similar reasons. The original group is slowly overwhelmed by people who will never understand because they are too different.
Poll Link:
Request for Feedback:
In addition to constructive criticism, I'd also like the following:
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Your observations of a decline or increase in quality, culture or enjoyment at LessWrong, if any.
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Ideas to protect the culture.
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Ideas for tracking cultural erosion.
- Ways to test the ideas to protect the culture.
Missions, perhaps? A few ideas: "We are rationalists, ask us anything" as an occasional post on reddit. Drop links and insightful comments around the internet where interesting people hang out.
Effect #1 is to raise the profile of rationality in the internet community in general, so that more people become interested. Effect #2 is that smart people click on our links and come to LW. I myself was linked to LW at first by a random link dropped in r/transhumanism or something. I immediately recognized the awesomeness of LW, and ate the sequences.
On the home front, I think we should go whole hog on being a well kept garden. Here's why:
There's no such thing as a crowd of philosophers. A movement should stay small and high quality as long as possible. The only way to maintain quality is to select for quality.
There are a lot of people out there, such that we could select for any combination of traits we liked and be unlikely to run out of noobs. We will have a much easier time at integration and community maintenance if we focused on only attracting the right folks.
I don't think we have to worry about creating rationalists from normals. There are enough smart proto-rationalists out there just itching to find something like LW, that all we have to do is find them, demonstrate our powers, and point them here. We should focus on collecting rationalists, not creating them. (Is there anyone for whom this wouldn't have worked? Worse, is there any major subset of good possible LWers that this turns off?)
As for integrating new people, I think the right people will find a way and it's ok if everyone else gets turned off. This might be pure wishful thinking. What are other people's thoughts on this?
Overall, have the low level missionary work happen out there where it belongs. Not in these hallowed halls.
As for what to do with these hallowed halls, here's my recommendations:
Elect or otherwise create an Official Community Organizer who's job it is to integrate all the opinions and make the decisions about the direction of LW. I think they would also provide direct friendly encouragement to the meetup organizers, who are currently totally lacking in coordination and support.
Sort out this crazy discussion/main bullshit. The current setup has very few desirable properties. I don't know what the solution should be, but we should at least be trying things. This of course requires someone to come up with ideas and code them. Would it be bad to try a different arrangement for a month?
Fix the front page. The valuable stuff there is approximately the banner, "featured posts", and current activity links. Everything else is of dubious value. The LW front page should be slick. Right now it looks like it was designed by a committee, and probably turns off most of our potentials.
Properly organize and index the LW material. This is a pretty big project; LW has thousands of good posts. This project neatly fits in with and builds on the current work in the wiki. The goal is a single root page from which every major insight is linked in at least a passable reading order. Like a textbook TOC. This obviously would benefit from wiki-improvements in general, for which I recommend merging wiki and LW accounts, and making wiki activity more visible and encouraged, among other things.
Friendship threads where we pick a partner and get to know them. Would generally increase community-coherence and civility. After meeting a lot of the other posters at the CFAR minicamp, I get more friendly feels in the community.
Somehow come up with the funding and political will to do all this stuff.
Something about trolls and idiots. Is this even a problem once the above are solved?
As for you, Epiphany, I want to commend you for still being at the throat of this problem, and still generating ideas and analysis. I'm impressed and humbled. Keep up the good work.